This reads like modern day food recipe sites. While the stories are great, I'm not sure it ever really tells us how to survive a lightning strike. The closest were the following two passages:<p>After ~10k characters:<p>> The best advice for people who find themselves outside during a lightning storm is simply to get inside, either a home or a vehicle. Yet even buildings aren’t completely impervious to lightning strikes. You’ll want to stay off the telephone, out of the shower, and away from sinks. Lightning can pass through landlines, plumbing—metal pipes and faucets—and all manner of electrical wiring.<p>And after another ~10k characters:<p>> The evidence suggests that lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage. Cooper and other researchers have speculated that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor’s unique internal circuitry<p>I think it was just a poor choice of a title.
> <i>Lightning also dramatically altered his personality. “It made me a mean, ornery son of a bitch. I’m short-tempered. Nothing is fun anymore. I am just not the same person my wife married”</i><p>Damages to the nerve system and the brain. I guess this process is similar to stressing a piece of analog electronics above its absolute maximum ratings, like overheat, overvoltage, or ESD. The device may still work to an extent, but performance is degraded, and its parameters have been permanently altered.
As somebody who has not been struck, but been damn close to a strike twice, I'd like to note that the folk wisdom that your hair stands up (like when you get goosebumps, I guess? Not like an Einstein picture?) before a strike and gives you some kind of warning is utterly false. What you're supposed to do when so warned is is unclear, but nevermind that.<p>How close is damn close?<p>This summer I was doing some work on a house when a storm rolled in. Went inside and waited out some heavy wind, lightning and rain. 10 minutes after the rain let up, the guy I was looking at and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and figured we'd get back to work. I went out to the patio and was pulling the tarp off the tablesaw when lightning struck. I reflexively count after a strike (I spend a lot of time in the woods), and the interval between the lightning and the thunder was long enough to register a lightning strike, but not to begin counting.<p>Needless to say, we went back inside, packed up our stuff there, and started loading the truck. As we were doing so, a fire truck came by inquiring where we might find a nearby address. Knowing that address and the address of the house we were working on let me determine that we were about 80m away from the strike using Google maps.<p>That's the second closest I've been. The closest was on the Appalachian Trail in 2010. I ducked into a shelter in the Shenandoahs to wait out a storm. The rain tapered off and stopped, and I figured I'd shove on for a few more miles before calling it a day (around 3:00 PM). As I was about to leave the shelter, lightning struck close enough that the lightning and thunder registered in my brain essentially simultaneously. Best estimate based on this summer's experience? 30m, maybe less?<p>In neither case did my hair stand up. If you need to be closer to the location of the impending strike to observe the phenomenon, I reckon you're pretty well boned.<p>If you're looking to not get struck by lightning in the first place, which seems advisable based on TFA, I'd suggest that the notion you're going to have some kind of warning before a strike is nonsense.<p>I would similarly note that just because it seems like the storm has passed doesn't mean it has. In high school marching band, the rule was that a football game couldn't resume until an hour after the last lightning. It seemed ridiculous at the time. Now it seems well-founded.
The best way to survive, of course, is to avoid a lightning strike.<p>Oh, and remember that rubber tires and rubber-soled shoes provide virtually no protection from lightning. In fact, many victims of lightning strikes are farmers in open fields riding tractors with rubber tires.
What's your actual odds of being struck if you wander out into an active thunderstorm and decide to play in the rain for an hour?<p>Is it actually more dangerous than driving a car for that same amount of time?
Crouch on your toes, put your hands over your ears. Being as low as possible, and keeping only your toes on the ground rather than the rest of your feet, makes your body a less useful (hence less likely) conduit to the ground.<p>If lightning's about to strike you, you can feel a brief warning tingle.
My boss after high school got struck by lightning while golfing, when he came back to work he had scars all over his body where the metal jewelry had melted and fused into his skin.